I recognized them from Food, Inc. They get them out of the chicken houses at night. It was maybe around 8 o’clock in the morning. (7:51 according to the timestamp.) According to Food, Inc., they’re put in the cages as little babies, and they put the sides down. These chickens have probably never seen daylight before:
So here we are on our way to a meeting about farmers markets to learn from health department and ag. inspectors, and here are these poor chickens. One of them was laying on its back. It was alive and wriggling its legs, but it couldn’t roll over.
All crowded together like that germs can spread easily, and they’re pumped full of antibiotics to prevent that. And don’t they give them hormones or steroids to grow fast, to make them profitable? And all those antibiotics and hormones and steroids go into our children when they eat the chickens.
And that’s safer than a chicken I could get from my friend?
When you see them in there, you think, “these are living creatures.” Maybe they’re just chickens, but they’re still living things. And what happens to the quality of the meat when you have this poor terrified chicken? Does that fundamentally change the composition of the chickens as they go to the slaughterhouse?
Gretchen says she doesn’t know how to blog, but she told me all that and I wrote it down. Pictures by Gretchen Quarterman just north of Pearson, Georgia, 21 March 2011.
-jsq
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